I received an email this evening from someone who wasn’t sure whether she should save up the bucks to buy a copy of Dreamweaver or if she should pluck for the very capable and inexpensive HomeSite. I pulled out my old brick wall analogy, and thought it might be fun to share it with you too. It goes like this:

Think of it this way … if you need to build a brick wall, both these programs will enable you do to that. Dreamweaver has a button labelled “Insert Brick Wall”. This inserts a standard wall of a fixed dimension. You can decide where to put it, but you have no say over the same size and shape. If you want to build a wall with HomeSite, you’ll find that it has a mixer and some cement, a plumb line and a trowel, but you have to bring along your own bricks. The upshot is that you can have any shape, size and colour of wall that you’d like, but you have to do the work yourself.

The end product from both is a brick wall. They’ll both keep the wolves out. Sometimes it just comes down to how fussy you are about your walls. I personally use HomeSite for all my development work, but Emperor Hadrian would have used Dreamweaver.